Calgary hail storm becomes a photo sharing event on digital networks

Here’s a sample of photos shared by Calgarians over web networks on Sunday, Aug. 12, 2012 about the hail storm. Clockwise, from top left: Allison Buchanan compared the size of the hailstones to several objects around her home. A dog checks out the action, by kayla_lynn. Wes Rath sent a photo from Mission, reporting on hailstone size,. @betamanic tweeted a photo of hailstones used as ice cubes in a glass of scotch.

It’s amazing, don’t you think? With smartphones and web networks, we can instantly transmit a shot to our friends or the whole world when something newsworthy comes along. Few of the photos could be considered technically exceptional. Many of the photos are downright quirky. Yet, we were mesmerized by these crowd-sourced images showing the hailstones’ size and the damage they caused.

The everyday, unrehearsed, authentic quality of shared pictures accounts for much of their appeal. These same folks could easily send a written text about the storm, or dictate an oral description of the event. They could have waited to watch someone else report on the storm for tomorrow’s news. Instead, they jumped into a weather conversation themselves, immediately, using images to tell their story. What amateur photographers really shared, more than just visual moments, were slices of raw experience.

To show the sheer size of the hailstones, many readers made a visual comparison to another object: fingers, a hand, golf balls, measuring tape, ruler, spoon, pair of sunglasses, badminton birdie, felt marker, quarter, loonie, toonie, a bowl, even a small dog. A little bit of contextual information about the readers’ lives slips through, in visual details such as a man’s pyjama bottoms, another man’s heavily tattooed forearm, or the size of a front yard.

One shared shot (below) with an almost cinematic quality came from Charlotte Bragg. The picture itself is dark and hurried. Charlotte wrote: “I was caught out in the storm in Calgary last night. I was dodging almost baseball-sized hail while I was trying to take pictures of the lightning. Here is a picture of the hail that I took when I was taking shelter under a wooden bridge along Memorial Drive. It had melted quite a bit by the time I took the picture.”

Charlotte Bragg’s grainy, evocative picture of a melting hailstone in her hand, taken while she was hiding from the hail storm under a bridge on Memorial Drive, on Sunday, Aug. 12, 2012.

Scrolling through the shots, I felt a range of emotions. I laughed, I was shocked and amazed, I shook my head. Sometimes, I wasn’t quite sure at first what I was looking at. A couple of times, I reacted with “ooooooohh” or “aaaaaaaahh,” as I gazed at a powerful visual moment frozen in time. More often, though, I felt engaged in the content itself and in how the photo was taken. I laughed out loud when I saw kayla_lynn’s picture of a dog poking its snout into the frame as she tried to take a picture of hailstones resting in someone’s outstretched hands. I can totally see our family dog doing that.

I contacted Chris Ollenberger, one of the dozens of Calgarians who sent us a photo after the storm (below), to learn more about how someone gets involved in a wide-scale photo sharing event. Ollenberger is a real estate developer who says he often takes pictures for work but who considers himself an amateur photographer. He used a Blackberry Torch because he knew it would save steps sharing the image later. By email, he fielded my questions:

Q:What motivated you to share a picture?

A:Many people were talking about golfball-size hail from a storm, and I saw one hailstone fall that was significantly bigger, so I wanted to share with others just how vicious the storm was in my neighbourhood!

Q:When you see your picture in the context of a gallery with a whole bunch of other pictures submitted by readers, how would you describe your reading experience?

A: It’s interesting to see how other people presented the hailstones and what they used as comparison objects to show size.

Chris Ollenberger used a measuring tape, a loonie and a toonie to show the size of hailstones that fell in his northwest Calgary neighbourhood.

Mobile technology can turn anyone into a visual storyteller, capable of communicating perspective and experience to a web audience. It’s interesting to consider how far the technology of photography has evolved, and how the socialexperience around photography has evolved too.

The CBC program Ideas, hosted by Paul Kennedy, wonderfully captured the social meaning of photography in its infancy, in an episode about the early Canadian photographer William Notman. The famous photographer’s iconic images of citizens and scenery in the mid-1800s helped visually establish Canada’s identity on the global stage. Back in those days, photo technology was bulky, expensive, painstaking, and mastered by few. Merely paying a visit to Notman’s portrait studio in downtown Montreal was an unusual event for those who could afford it. It follows that the paying customer’s experience of photography was distant and formal, reserved for marking special moments in family or community life.

News publications embraced photography as a way to present visual truth, giving rise to the heyday of photojournalism in the early- to mid-20th century, before television came along. Audiences loved the news photographer’s ability to shoot with objectivity, define the decisive moment, and demonstrate artistic vision, recalls photographer, professor and researcher Julianne Newton in “Photojournalism: Do People Matter? Then Photojournalism Matters.” Perhaps nothing better captures this seeing-is-believing culture than a quote by Henri Cartier-Bresson, who is considered by many to be the father of modern photojournalism: “To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.”

As digital camera technology took hold in the late 20th century, and the sharing of pictures became widespread, new ways to understand photography emerged. The work of several academic researchers describes the shifting perceptions of the medium, and the social implications.

Three researchers who work in and study mobile media, Camille Baker, Max Schleser, and Kasia Molga, examined a wide spectrum of shared images for their article, “Aesthetics of Mobile Media Art.” They find that the mobile media environment is more accessible and intimate, lending itself to the transmission of spontaneous, immediate, low-quality, often chaotic images.

All these weighty studies grapple with a shift that has been underway for some years. Event photography–in the hands of professionals– concerned itself with freezing key moments in time. Now, event photography– in the hands of ordinary citizens–is on the move. Traditional photojournalism remains a powerful way to capture and witness the significance and emotion of a news event. But the postmodern audience also appreciates the everyday, offbeat, personal qualities seen in streams of pictures taken by amateurs. Which explains the popularity of the hail storm photos this past week on our website and elsewhere.

What’s more, photo sharing is part of an ongoing conversation with readers. Tom Babin, the Herald’s digital editor of engagement, pointed out in an email to our colleagues in the newsroom late in the week that photos shared on calgaryherald.com help readers feel more connected to the Herald. “It means, not only are we getting better as a newsroom at seeking out and recognizing the importance of user-generated content, our readers are getting accustomed to it as well,” Babin wrote.

The experts call this a digital culture. Calgarians used mobile technology to compare notes about a storm. What a story!

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